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BokLM writes "Microsoft's Amir Majidimehr, Corporate VP of the Windows Digital Media Division, explained at a DRM conference in London why they require a license fee from device makers." From the article: "According to Amir, the fee is not intended to recoup the expenses Microsoft incurred in developing their DRM, or to turn a profit. The intention is to reduce the number of licensees to a manageable level, to lock out 'hobbyists' and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with."

"A Microsoft spokesman has described their DRM licensing scheme as a system for reducing the number of device vendors to a manageable number, so that the company doesn't have to oversee too many developers."

Ballmer: Developers! Developers! Developers!

Yeah, uh huh... right... sounds more like THIS discussion...

Dr. Walter Gibbs: User requests are what computers are for!Ed Dillinger: DOING OUR BUSINESS is what computers are for.

But they are starting the long slow trend that ends with Xbox bow. They still want developers, but only large ones. Because in the end the goal is to turn the PC into an Xbox. All applications are signed by Microsoft and they collect a piece of the action in exchange for it. It solves most of their security problems, lets them tap vast new revenue streams to show investors some growth and allows them the total freedom to screw each developer in turn by introducing their own replacement and deciding the 3rd party app no longer 'meets our strategic vision' and refusing to continue signing.

Not if free software can't boot. Have you tried to run free software on a video game console without making modifications that are illegal in at least one major developed country? Even if free software is allowed to boot, it is likely not to be able to get an IP address because all the residential high-speed ISPs use Trusted Network Connect and only "trust" specific unmodified Microsoft and Apple operating systems. It could very well happen by 2015 [slashdot.org].

according to the interview with Jeremy White at http://www.lugradio.org/ [lugradio.org] codeweavers seems to be doing exactly that. according him it is a bitch to implement because the drm code tries to make it as hard as possible to hide from you what kind of calls it is trying to make.

"I was pretty surprised to hear an executive from Microsoft describe his company's strategy as intentionally anti-competitive and intended solely to freeze out certain classes of operators rather than maximizing its profits through producing a better product and charging a fair price for it."

Really? I thought that everybody -- especially Slashdot -- had this impression.

Those damn hobbyists are the entire problem! Those bastards! Er...this has nothing to do with tromping the little guys...

The intention is to reduce the number of licensors to a manageable level, to lock out "hobbyists" and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that Microsoft has the resources to "manage" nearly any number of "hobbyists"? I mean, laziness is one thing, but sheesh...I wonder if there are any backroom deals being made here?

Here's a little viral propaganda you might like to try spreading. Refer to it always as the war against terror. In conversation. In posts. On IRC. It's the war AGAINST terror. Try to get that alternative phrase into common currency. Get your friends to do the same. Spread the meme throughout/. - there's nearly a million of us, and we're quite talkative, so if we work in concert to subvert the language we can make a difference. Think of it as linguistic Googlebombing.

It's just possible that the acronym of the new phrase, and its appropriateness to the likes of Bush and Blair, will have a subliminal effect on all who hear the phrase. George Bush leads us in the war against terror. TWAT.

That's actually kinda cool in a way.Right now a lot of people write software to release for the windows market because of the profit/risk ratio. If they add another layer of fees to pay then that ratio shifts in favor of other solutions.

There only needs to be one "killer game" for linux that is not on windows and the jig is up. Linux would probably gain 10% penetration from that one event.

By driving away developers who are creating things- just not "big enough"- they are creating a set of developers for o

The intention is to reduce the number of licensors to a manageable level, to lock out 'hobbyists' and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with."

If it turns out that hobbyists are a bad thing, then the market will demonstrate that. There's no need to act as if your rights are being suppressed.

Sometimes hobbyists are phenomenal for a platform (the Apple II platform, Linux). Sometimes they don't seem to provide enough benefit to be essential. Game consoles are effectively closed to hobbyists and despite the degree of amateur work, Flash was never really a free platform to seriously develop for.

The only area in which I can think of that this isn't true is when monopolies exist (such as the cell phone market, where cell providers can force the platform closed by requiring that anyone that uses their services provide only a closed platform).

Anyone can sit down and provide something an an encoded audio and video format. There are a lot more MPEG-based players out there than anything else, and it's not as if hobbyists can't produce content for these. Microsoft's chosen their market (at least in the short term). Let them play with the idea and see whether it pans out.

If it turns out that hobbyists are a bad thing, then the market will demonstrate that.

Too late. Microsoft has already demonstrated it, and they have much more influence in the market than you or I. There is no amorphous "market." There are companies that sell products. And they are lining up against fair use, and creating a barrier to entry for others who are not on their side.

The question isn't whether hobbyists are good or bad; it depends on where things are at the time. In the Apple I days, computers of that type were considered toys more than tools by businesses, and hobbyists were correspondingly more important. In that context, MS isn't anti-hobbyists, it's anti-spending-money-on-them-in-this-area.This is basic business profit maximization logic, and you hear it all the time. There's a whole industry of management consultants who do little more than point out that if you

"Hobbyist" is just a euphemism (or is it aphorism) for "two guys in a garage". I can think of several examples of this that had a considerable impact on computing. Discriminate against these sorts of fellows at your own peril. They are where all the nifty new ideas come from because the large corps tend to beat that sort of thing out of you.

In order for a consumer to hold both a protected object and the ability to use it, then they must have the key to unlock the protection...somewhere. So, in addition, companies now have to deal with licensing and compliantcy issues. And DRM sacrificies the rights of the majority at the expense of the minority.Every leg of DRM is trying to collapse it: except two.

The only supporting legs are a company's desire to "protect" their work and the necessary laws to make circumvention of DRM illegal

This isn't news, nor is it some grand conspiracy. It's perfectly normal business practice. If you price a product (or worse, make it available for free,) you'll have huge demand. This demand carries with it a customer support expense, which can be quite large. You can break a company with excessive expenses, of which customer support is one.

When pricing a product, you typically want to set a minimum price specifically for the purpose of eliminating the deadbeat/hobbyist factor. Yes, you'll lose a couple of potential sales because the price presents a barrier to entry, but if you did the math properly, that minor loss is substantially easier to swallow than the loss from a huge non-revenue-generating support obligation. If the majority of your customers are businesses, they won't blink at a couple-hundred bucks for a product.

Actually, it is. A monopolist has partnered with two cartels and all three of them have been convicted of illegally abusing their market positions. They are partnering to build an artificial barrier to entry in the convergence of their markets and to leverage their existing position to gain an advantage in new markets. This is most definitely a conspiracy and it is news. Here's a hint. It is illegal to use a monopoly to gain an advantage in other markets or to build barriers to entry to those markets. MS has partnered to do just that, implementing software restrictions to provide some parties with a market advantage using their monopoly on desktop OSs.

When pricing a product, you typically want to set a minimum price specifically for the purpose of eliminating the deadbeat/hobbyist factor.

Since when is an artificial restriction on use a "product?"

If the majority of your customers are businesses, they won't blink at a couple-hundred bucks for a product.

And you think that makes it ok or something? MS has a monopoly and they are using that monopoly to collect an additional toll from developers in the separate software application market. That is illegal.

The simple solution is this: if support is an expense, charge for support. It's just that simple. Businesses do it all the time. Cygnus made millions that way; Red Hat is doing all right too, I hear. From the hardware side, Sun makes a pretty penny on the hardware, but they make even more on support contracts.Pricing something just to freeze out a certain segment of the population might be standard business practice, but it has nothing to do with the economics of support. It has to do with freezing out a ce

This really isn't news - Microsoft has been actively trying to limit hobbyists and small businesses entry into creating new applications for the PC for ten years or more. This is just one more way to squeeze them (us) out.

Personally, I don't understand this behavior because it is so damaging in the long term - students (who can also be thought of as "hobbyists") will not be able to easily work on Microsoft products and will naturally gravitate towards more open solutions...

I've never understood why Microsoft wasn't more supportive of the student, hobbyist and small business marketplace. I can understand that they do not want products propagating that use obsolute interfaces/methodologies but there should be some halfway point, not freezing out those of us that want to experiment with PC applications and don't have deep pocket sponsors.

Beyond MS and the XBox, this practice is pretty common in both the HW and SW industries. If you've ever: tried to synthesize FPGA code, get a compiler for a up,uc that's not mainstream, tried to get an eval board, tried to get API info, tried to program for any console or handheld, you've come across this practice.

Most of that stuff is FREE to corporate customers, companies will voluntarily lose money just to get people to try to use their product. However for people on the street, or companies too small to be "real", they will charge thousands upon thousands of dollars for these materials, if they will let you have them at all.

On one hand they're right, true hobbyists often have day jobs that are not in the industry (since those in the industry often gank this stuff from work) and can generate a lot of cost by a multitude of questions and misunderstandings. On the other hand, one persons hobby could turn into a good business, if their idea or project becomes interesting. By discouraging this, they are effectively discouraging innovation in anything less than a rather well funded start-up.

If you've ever: tried to synthesize FPGA code... Most of that stuff is FREE to corporate customers, companies will voluntarily lose money just to get people to try to use their product. However for people on the street, or companies too small to be "real", they will charge thousands upon thousands of dollars for these materials, if they will let you have them at all.

Xilinx [xilinx.com] provide the basic ISE synthesis tools[1] for their smaller FPGAs for free, no matter who you are, and for their more powerful tool

They may have made a mistake by even licensing this tech at all. Have you tried using a WMA device? I purchased a SanDisk MP3 player over Xmas to try out the Napster-to-Go service. Needless to say, the confusion started when you had to deal with two pieces of software (WMP and Napster) and the fact that the hardware OS is inconsistent from one manufacturere to another.

I recently bought (and returned) a Philips mp3 player to use for audiobooks. Not only can the thing not display track time > 1 hr.,

As far as I remember, Microsoft has been calling the OSS community a bunch of hobbyists since the OSS movement appeared on their radar (as a threat, of course). The article agrees, as MS tells "the intention is to reduce the number of licensors [...] to lock out "hobbyists" and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with", the article says this is plain anticompetitive: "I was pretty surprised to hear an executive from Microsoft describe his company's strategy as intentionally anti-competitive and intended solely to freeze out certain classes of operators [...]"

I understand that Bill Gates has a business to run these days, but blocking out the hobbysists isn't the answer - that's where the most innovation happens, most great inventions have come from "hobbyists." (Think TV, Phone, Linux...)

Perhaps someone should remind Bill Gates where MS came from, wasn't he (and co) a hobbyist at Uni where MS started??

A lot of DVDs made in Finland get region code 0. I can understand that (some noble but ultimately futile dreams on Finnish cinema getting big on foreign market, I guess =). But most of the DVDs don't seem to have CSS either, which kind of puzzles me.

I'm not familiar with how CSS licensing works for content authors, but maybe, maybe some Finnish producers said "hey, let's copy protect these things" and another producer said "well, that's not going to happen, have you seen what prices they're asking for tha

The intention is to reduce the number of licensees to a manageable level, to lock out 'hobbyists' and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with.

I find it way too easy to replace "hobbyists" with "independent music producers" in that quote. And lock them out to benefit who? Organized Music? Almost certainly. MS wants to play nice with Big Music, get their content, and make a few more tens of billions in the process. Get government to close the so called "Analog Hole". Lock struggling producers out of a standard for DRM. Nothing here to hurt the big players at all. All this is just another reason why MS must die.

Is it just me or is it a little ironic for them to say this. I mean after all, didn't MS, along with most of the other modern computing giants, start as a couple of geek hobbyists in a garage somewhere? The Quest for Cash is getting a little beyond stupid these days. It is one thing to be cutthroat, unethical, and often illegal in business, but more and more the trends are following more along the lines of head in the sand, or pure insanity. At least when they are being cutthroat, unethical, and often illegal, they are a little more stable and predictable.

However, this is done quiet often in the distribution world. Most software distributors I've dealt with require an application payment. I don't actually agree with the strategy, but it's done so that they only have to deal with "serious" companies.

Now the major difference is these distributors have competition, but the only competetion to protected WMA/V DRM is Apple's FairPlay, which only Apple gets to use.

Also realize that, in effect, this is exactly what the DVD-CCA does. Only issues liscences to people who agree to play by their restrictive terms.

On a certain level MS probably also believes that their DRM will be cracked more easily/quickly if smaller, less "ethical" coders could get their hands on it. But it didn't do the DVD people much good. IIRC, DVD Jon was able to crack CSS after the cypher was anonymously leaked to him

The statement in the article does not mean that Microsoft does not like hobbyists producing software - indeed, if you look at the billions of dollars Microsoft has invested in hobbyist level tools, I think its pretty clear that they encourage hobbyist developers. What they don't encourage is hobbyist developers distributing DRM keys on devices in an unmanageable way.

Whatever you may feel about DRM, Microsoft's position on the potential use of DRM is pretty clear - they believe, right or wrong, that consumers can have access to the best content if and only if that content can be protected.

Honestly, what would hobbyists do with a truly open DRM SDK for devices? The secure path audio only applies to media sources LEAVING the PC, not input sources, so it doesn't affect microphones, instruments and the types of devices that casual users might actually be developing. Hobbyists won't have the substantial financial backing to produce their own playback device. Any small company who has the desire and financial resources is going to have the cash to spend on this liscensing scheme, especially considering that Microsoft has always employed hefty discounts for small ISVs. This doesn't prevent hobbyists from working with DRM'd media streams on devices they purchased - if the device manufacturer liscensed the DRM from Microsoft (which it would have to, or you couldn't enjoy media on the device), then you can still use a healthy amount of the Windows Media SDK to work with media stream, limitted to some extent by the secure path, but that's a different gripe.

Given the financial difficulty of building a full device capable of full media playback, what would hobbyists do with an SDK that allowed raw access to protected content - most of them would write software the emulates a virtual device to circumvent the DRM. That's exactly what Microsoft is attempting to prevent.

Plenty of hobbyists (amateur producers doing video and music) will need to be able to *create* content in whatever medium is required. It's not just about consuming, it's also about being able to deliver in the format that's required, or risk being shut out. That said, I doubt any studios will ever be in the position where they can't import a 16 bit.wav file. But there are already enough artificial barriers between an amateur music or video producer and the commercial world.

The twisted logic involved with DRM is so extreme, it's hard to believe anyone can go along with any of it. Two minutes of thought expose the whole framework for what it is.

Whatever you may feel about DRM, Microsoft's position on the potential use of DRM is pretty clear - they believe, right or wrong, that consumers can have access to the best content if and only if that content can be protected.

By protection, you must mean lock out all but a few publishers. Why else limit who can make a player? This

I work in Developer Relations for a big wireless carrier, so this is close to my heart. While I've been a Mac user since 1985 ('nuff said), I do have a lot of respect of Microsoft when it comes to Developer Relations... they do know what they're doing in that area.I can understand the source of the Microsoft's VP's statement, although if his wording was close to what was paraphrased in the article, it was a poor choice of words.

If Microsoft is hoping to get real devices out there that include their DRM component, then what they're doing is putting up a barrier to entry to ensure that only those who are truly committed to building a mass-market product get the attention of internal staff so that MS can make money indirectly through devices that use and license the DRM component.

Whether or not that's a sound business practice is their decision to make. But it's not a unique model. If you want to release a game on PlayStation, Gamecube or XBox, you license the development kits from Sony, Nintendo or XBox. They do this because they're in a mass market and need to ensure that the companies they work with and who use their name are equipped for what happens when something succeeds massively or has major problems. Microsoft's approach for their DRM is no different--the only difference is that a VP went out and actually set realistic expectations for what it takes to be a developer for those platforms in a forum that pissed boingBoing off--enough of a commitment and a financial stake in the game to make sure that something useful comes out of all the work people put into it.

It's true that hobbyists are often the source of completely original, unexpected innovations, and any company that is serious about innovation encourages that. Developer programs that embrace this open themselves up to very new ideas. But let's make a clear distinction between encouraging hobbyists and the business drive behind encouraging real applications, services or devices that make money for a developer and the company that makes money from the platform.

Please don't get me wrong: I stay at my job managing a developer program because I love answering developer questions. I love helping someone out and seeing them succeed, particularly if they have a great idea and the nads to see it through. I also believe that developers should have as many tools freely available as they can have. Where I work, I always try to argue for making information, APIs and toolkits open and accessible to every developer. I often get into some very heated discussions with people who argue that we should only make this API or that piece of documentation available to existing partners because they don't want to deal with hobbyists--in fact, I'm actively lobbying for something like that as I type. I tell internal resistors that by staying closed off they're never going to hear of the new stuff, they'll only hear from the same people over and over again and they'll still have to deal with hobbyists. I also help hobbyists and independent developers figure out ways of selling their product without having to build a business relationship with MegaCorp and dealing with what can be a bureaucratic process.

Being on the support side of things, I also contend with the reality of this internal advocacy--I often have to guide hobbyists and amateurs who are dabbling and who can consume hours of my day while clearly showing me that they're very unlikely to actually come up with something that could be a marketable product even if they go it alone.

Hobbyists-cum-entrepreneurs often have very unrealistic expectations regarding what they need to do to succeed. Some hobbyists tend to consume an inordinate amount of time from a company's developer relations and business development staff and don't turn out something that can actually become a product--and honestly, my business is to get developers from idea to market. These things include adequate support staff, sales teams, marketing funds, technical acumen and enough wherewithal to deal with contract n

have done had DEC locked the system from hobbyist? The first computer he used was a DEC PDP-10 that was owned by General Electric. His high school paid General Electric for time that the students could use to program the computer. Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen spent many hours at the computer, eventually causing their grades to suffer from skipped classes and late homework. When they were given a new system to work with, they hacked into the system to make it so that the computer did not record the t

Ever since PS/2 fiasco, Microsoft backstabbing IBM on account of OS/2 and rise of Wintel trust, Microsoft was having the last word in design of PC hardware and controlled the evolution of PC.It is still so, because, unfortunately, various Windows are still most ubiquituous, despite recent explosive proliferation of free OS's. I am certain they are cospiring to, using DRM as an excuse, lock free competition out, by bullying hardware vendors into ever tighter subjugation to themselves. In the end (and I suppo

I was ranting about this a couple weeks ago for the guy who wanted to stream all sound off his windows computer [slashdot.org]. There used to be a fake sound card drive which would pipe to esound, but it was for WinNT4, back when DDK was free, or at least included with Visual Studios.

1997 is calling. they want their news back assholes. and i want my fucking mod points you didnt give me the first time around for this story.

There once was a bus system called the Microchannel. In its age, it was revolutionary. Look it up, and be stunned by the opportunities this system presented. Remember, this was the age of ISA (Not even VLB, heck, not even EISA and faaaaar from PCI) cards.

It was good. Unlike the DRM junk, this was REALLY good. It only had one single flaw:

IBM threatened to execute patent rights. And the card manufacturers were afraid they couldn't actually make a buck with MCA cards after paying royalties to IBM for the patents.

So most of them, besides a few big players, went down the conservative road and decided it would be better to stick with ISA. It's slower, yes, it's limited, yes, but at least we can actually make a buck there.

Customers split up. Those who decided to stick with ISA, to be compatible with their old hardware, hardware they needed and was not available on MCA, and those who stood true to IBM and trusted them to create new line of hardware. The first group saw that they could get cheaper hardware, not only add-on cards but even the "main machine" from 3rd party vendors that are still compatible with their old ISA cards.

The other group went after the first when IBM decided to dump the Microchannel Architecture in the early 90s, leaving their customers with big investments that led into a dead end, forcing them to buy completely new hardware altogether as well. And understandably, they did not want to sink more money into IBM...

And the MCA, which was a great design, went away before it even started to fly. And marked one of the cornerstones of IBMs decline from THE computer company to ONE computer company today.

As I understand it the problem is that Microsoft has to validate submitted drivers to see that they follow the DRM rules and don't have any back doors to let content be extracted. This is a big job so they can't afford to do it for every driver that any person feels like submitting, opening themselves up to a sort of DOS attack. By charging a fee for submissions they limit their work to only people who are really serious about it, and shut out the merely curious and those who hate DRM and would try to monkey-wrench it.

There may be another reason for restricting the developer set. Keep in mind that this isn't a general restriction, it's only in the area of DRM.

From what I remember, DVD CSS was cracked because one company used a weak key. That key was SO bad it was fairly easy to brute-force, and then there were more fundamental weaknesses that allowed them to extract the other keys, given the first one.

Had there never been a weak key, perhaps DVD John never would have gotten his 15 minutes of fame.

So perhaps this DRM developer restriction is to make sure that nobody makes a weak key, that they do a better job of educating this smaller set of developers.

Microsoft wants companies to pay them if they plan on writing software that works on Windows. If they don't pay, they don't get a "certificate" from microsoft, and they intend for Windows to refuse to execute any software that doesn't have this special "certificate"?

This sounds conspicuously like "pay us a 'protection' fee so nothing 'bad' will happen".

WMA is chump change compared to Fairplay. Why isn't someone complaining that you can't license Fairplay for any price? Apple has a monopoly on audio DRM, at least a monopoly in the same sense that MS has a monopoly in the OS realm.

And remember, it's the HOBBYISTS who've done more to advance computing than anything Microsoft has done to advance the state of software development in the world. (Linus Torvalds anyone?)

Linux didn't really advance computing, Linux is yet another reimplementation of Unix. AT&T advanced computing by developing Unix. I'm open to the idea of giving UC Berekeley some credit too, but we have the reimplementation issue as well. However Berkeley does deserve credit for it's open license, Linux's GPL license being a reimplementation of the the open distribution idea. Please don't misunderstand, I am not slamming Linux or minimizing the enormous efforts that went into it's development. Linux is an outstanding technical achievement, but it does not offer original ideas, it merely offers original source code.

He may not have created any new technologies, but I'd content that he did advance computing by putting a free Unix-like system into the hands of hundreds of millions of people worldwide who likely would not be able to afford a Unix license.

Except for the fact that Linux has acted as a testbed for new scheduling algorithms, new virtual memory algorithms, new interrupt handling routines, etc. Without Linux these projects might have been conducted in an ivory tower demo OS or something else with little impact on the real world and no feedback on how they ACTUALLY perform. Linux through its open source nature has fostered a real world petri dish that wouldn't have existed otherwise and therefore has advanced the art of computer science.

Except for the fact that Linux has acted as a testbed for new scheduling algorithms, new virtual memory algorithms, new interrupt handling routines, etc. Without Linux these projects might have been conducted in an ivory tower demo OS or something else with little impact on the real world and no feedback on how they ACTUALLY perform. Linux through its open source nature has fostered a real world petri dish that wouldn't have existed otherwise and therefore has advanced the art of computer science.

You seem to ignore the fact that FreeBSD was also available to the PC masses, with source code for the hobbyists to tinker with. It was no ivory tower demo. FreeBSD was used to host major sites long before Linux was ready for such duties, many a Linux distribution was downloaded from a site hosted by FreeBSD. To use your analogy, there was more than one Petri dish. Again, Linux is an outstanding achievement, but original, first, or irreplacable it is not. Irreplacable in a technical sense, certainly not in a political sense.

This is an extrodinarily narrow view. You know, at one point in time hobbists contributed greatly to WinDOS. You might say they are even responsible for the rise of WinDOS as a platform. You don't have to be someone like Linus or Alan to be a "hobbyist". You can simply be a specialist in another discipline: like the folks who invented the spreadsheet.

Linux advanced computing by showing that a development team could produce a complex, highly-functional software product without a $100 million budget, without an office, without mid-level managers, and without employment contracts.

"it's the HOBBYISTS who've done more to advance computing"If it wasn't for people like the HOBBYISTS who were hand wire-wrapping intel 8008's into S100 boards and their own TV Dazzler cards from articles in hobbyist magazines; IBM never would have made the PC which is now killing their profitable mainframe business and Billy Gates never would have had a platform to launch either DOS/Basic or Windows on. My first computer used an RCA 1802 CPU, was programmered by hand toggleing the machine code in byte by by

You probably use computers today specifically because of Microsoft Windows at some point in the past.

Sorry, this is WRONG. By and large we use computers DESPITE using Microsoft Windows, not BECAUSE of it. Microsoft has always been a low-innovation company; it takes old ideas and finds new opportunities for them. Microsoft's very first product, BASIC for the MITS Altair, was an old idea brought into a new market space. Bill and Paul didn't invent BASIC, and didn't invent the OS. By the mid 70's writing

No, the post to which you are replying is right; your original post is a truly horrible "summary" and that post is no better.

He doesn't say he "is the best at doing it" - he says he has put a lot of time and effort in.

He doesn't say that "Free software is bad because he can't make money" - he says that he is not in the business of offering free software and the lack of sales is dissuading him further development work.

What you're writing is classic spin. You're inferring things from the article, nothing more, then stating your interpretations as facts.The quotes you offer are nowhere near "smoking guns". Does he dislike hobbyists? Well, I think it's fairly clear he strongly dislikes the 'hobbyists' who are stealing his software. But then you twist that and put words into his mouth, such as "hobbyists cannot write good software". Correction: what he SAID was that he doesn't see how programmers can spend 3 years on their '

Gates wants hobbiests to charge for software including paying him for a Basic license. He wanted to create an environment where there is a software industry back in 1976. In this case MS doesn't want hobbiest according to their words because they don't want to support the hobbiest. However to the more cynical of people, I think it is to prevent hobbiest from making software that is as good or if not better than the software industry and giving it away for free. The biggest threats to MS right now is free so

I don't disagree with the sentiment; I simply feel that the paragraph did not convey the same message that the poster's "summary" did. I have since been told that "above" referred to the link, and not to the selection given. An odd way to present an argument, but the full text of the letter certainly has more substance to it.

And in a shocking twist of events people are pissed off that he found a way to capitalize on the mentality of this behavior to make billions. Seems to me like he relized something:People are going to pirate software.If it can be built, it can be taken apart.

These two things will never change. So instead of fighting the system you work with it to find things to exploit for the purpose of getting ahead..

Lock up the data and people will be forced to migrate to your schedule on your terms.

Classic diplomatic speak. The real issue which was presented by the original post was carefully walked around by BG. By claiming that software sharing is hurting his company (in this case development tools) he precludes giving more concrete examples.

What BG is particularily upset about is that the shared dev. tools are used to create competitive software. Whats more, this is done using software that was never going to make a profit anyway. So BG is upset about a faulty business plan. If he didn't sell dev. tools he would be alright and he could complain about people stealing his OS's (kinda like he did at the start with DOS - he payed much less for it that it was worth, kinda like people that steal windows because they feel that a windows license isnt $500).

Bottom line: Hobbyists will push their software and hardware. Hobbyists create worms and virii for all we know. Hobbyists are bad. Im a hobbyist. A+B != C always.

Either way Bill Gates is lying. You can get free software that is well-maintained. The software developers may not be financially motivated, but they are motivated to improve the software AND keep it free. Whatever motivation it is that drives Free Software, if I were a capitalist I'd stop and think a moment about the factors that are motivating hundreds or thousands of computer scientists to give of their time freely. But since I'm not a capitalist I wouldn't spend any time trying to think of a way to

No, what's he's saying is don't steal software just to write your own. Thanks to people like him, we now have many free tools and can write our own software without paying, and without stealing. If you truly think that a product is worth using, then pay what they are charging. If you don't think it's worth what they are asking, then don't use it.

No, things HAVE changed. Developers have to make money somehow, and 30 years ago they made money from the sale of their software. Today, there is no end to the software you can get for free, with the developer making money on the support of that software.All your idiotic paraphrasing did was make you sound like an advocate for software theft. If you don't like someone's software, you should go write your own, you shouldn't steal it. If you don't like how much Photoshop costs, you shouldn't steal it, you

You know, I have to agree with this. I'm a bgi supporter and advocate for Free Software and Open Source Software. As such, I feel I have to be particularly careful about respect for IP and IP laws (even as I advocate for the change of those laws). Those same laws underpin the GPL, LGPL, BSD, and other licenses out there.Violating a shrink-wrap EULA is just as egregious as violating the GPL. If we wish to be strict about the one, we have to be strict about the other. I think with the increasing "DRM" and act

> As such, I feel I have to be particularly careful about respect for IP and IP laws

Please do not perpetuate the myth of IP. RMS is dead right on this one, ceeding the enemy control of the language will lose us the war. Yes I do respect Copyright, patent and Trademarks.... at least most of the time.:)

> Violating a shrink-wrap EULA is just as egregious as violating the GPL.

No it isn't. A shrink wrap EULA is meaningless unless you live in Virgina and perhaps not even there. A contract requires two parties and if I refuse to accept the EULA I'm still allowed to use the software by virtue of having purchased a copy of it. I don't believe allowing software publishers to impose one sided "contracts' you can't even read until you no longer have a right to get your money back is something worthy of even considering submitting to. To compare it to the GPL shows your ignorance of the difference between the two.

You are not required to accept the GPL either, btw. If you refuse it you may still use the copy you aquired in any way that is acceptable under the Copyright laws of your jurisdictiom. By accepting it you gain permission to redistribute the work subject to the terms and conditions of the GPL. Notice the difference between this and any EULA. All EULAs attempt to subtract rights otherwise granted under Copyright law.

Interviewer: "Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?"

Gates: "No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system." -- From: 'Programmers at work', Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA [c1986]:

In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who were students at Harvard University at the time, adapted BASIC to run on the popular Altair 8800 computer and sold it to the Altair's manufacturer, MITS. The Altair BASIC interpreter was the first computer language program to run on the type of computer that would later become known as the home computer or personal computer. Even though the BASIC programming language was already in the public domain by then, the interpreter that could run it on home computers wasn't. Thus Gates and Allen had created an original product; a true innovation. It would be one of their last.

Gates and Allen had initially met at Lakeside School (an exclusive private school for rich boys) where Gates became an adept at BASIC on a General Electric Mark II. Shortly thereafter they got access to a PDP-10 run by a private company in Seattle. The company offered free time to the Lakeside school kids to see if they could crash the system. Gates proved to be particularly adept at doing so. When the free time ran out Gates and Allen figured out how to get free time on the PDP-10 by logging on as the system operator. About a year later the private company running the PDP-10 went bankrupt.

This left Gates and Allen without a source of free computing power. Therefore Allen went over to the University of Washington and began using a Xerox computer by pretending to be a graduate student. Gates soon followed, and this went on until they were caught and removed from the campus. They continued to break into university and privately owned computer systems until about 1975. By that time Gates was a student at Harvard University. The BASIC he sold to MITS had been developed and tested on a Harvard PDP-10 using an 8080-emulation program that Allen had adapted from earlier code. In fact, by the time Gates contacted MITS to announce their product, it had never ran on an actual 8080 CPU. The demonstration Gates and Allen put up for MITS in New Mexico was the first time the product actually ran on the system it was intended for. Gates sold it by announcing a product that didn't exist, developing it on the model of the best version available elsewhere, not testing it very seriously, demonstrating an edition that didn't fully work, and finally releasing the product in rather buggy form after a lengthy delay. From then on this modus operandi became Microsoft's trademark.

After Gates sold the new BASIC interpreter to MITS he left Harvard University, and went into business for himself with Allen as a partner. Allen was also an MITS employee at the time, which made his position rather interesting. Gates' departure from Harvard is shrouded in controversy: some say he dropped out, others say he was expelled for stealing computer time. Whatever the case may be, the fact is that Gates did most of the work on his BASIC version in a Harvard computer lab without having been authorized to use the (expensive) computer time needed for the project. Perhaps he did not really steal unauthorized computer capacity (which was a valuable commodity in those days) to develop his first commercially successful product. Yet he has never offered another explanation. He did however send his now-infamous "Open Letter To Hobbyists" to every major computer publication in February 1976, in which he decried the copying of Microsoft software by home computer hobbyists as simple theft. -- excerpt borrowed from Why I hate Microsoft [freedomware.us]

"The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but

Who, exactly, is the little guy? I'll give him $100. But seriously, who in the software business isn't a large corporation? The Open Source movement? They're giving people the code - not exactly a target for piracy...

You mention two extremes, the mega corporation and open source. The little guy is in the middle. He's the guy that ends up working for the former and sometimes donating to the latter, rather than having his own small company. Gates claimed 90% piracy, lets dial that back to 50%. Do you thin

I'm still trying to figure out why its bad when Microsoft is restrictive, but when its Apple's modus operandi everyone ooohs and ahhhs over each technological development? If you buy Microsoft's products, you subscribe to their vision of the 'platform'... if it diverges from what you want to accomplish, then don't bother buying it!

Ultimately this will just drive the technologically inquisitive towards linux. Linux won't displace Windows or even OS/X today, or tomorrow, or next year. But after a generatio

Look around you.Everyone is to busy hanging out at the mall, or spending their pocket money for ringtones and other junk. A "buy this!" generation is growing up, unable to do the most basic tasks by themselves.

In the 80s, people dumped video games for home computers. The slogan was "Why buy your kid a game when you can buy him something that gets him to college?"That trend has already changed.Today the slogan is more akin to "Why bother with operating systems and incompatible hardware when you can just slip

The current generation of teens/(very) young adults is taking a step backwards as far as the amount of functional knowledge. Generation X will be looked upon by history as the high point of digital innovation. Gen X will be to network-driven innovation what the Apple II/C64 generation was to computer hardware development: the initial blossoming of innovation before the chilling onset of a corporate homogenization of methods and implementations (an ice age, if you will).

So many people honestly believe that they aren't complete morons for paying a dollar (or more) for a fucking ringtone! (And a ringtone that has terrible sound quality at that.) The current young generation's attitude towards learning is far more apathetic than gen X's. The prevailing attitude is, "Why should I learn about something when I can just google it on demand?"

What I think is really going to define the social dynamics of the Gen Y job market and society is a new kind of digital divide. Not the 'digital divide' that refers to some people not having access to technology. The real digital divide will be between those people who have made technology their masters (by refusing to actually learn anything - relegating knowledge to the machines - and elites), and those who instill in their children the importance of being the masters of technology. That will be the real digital divide.

This is the very same education ethic you refered to when you said Why buy your kid a game when you can buy him something that gets him to college? The difference will be that getting the access to the physical hardware isn't the barrier to success. It's going to be the inquisitive epiphany that "I should pull that compliance chip off my motherboard and figure out what's happening inside that $30 computer? After all, if the hardware's so cheap, what is it about computers that makes them the key to making a lot of money in the (idustrialized) world?"

And that epiphany is going to become something that is less and less spontaneous as companies like MS, Apple, Google, etc. start pumping more and more of their advertising budgets into building a "just use it - don't worry about how it works" culture.